Day 15 - Graphing Functions with Excel

The students completed an in-depth bell ringer involving the skills covered in the previous class.

Reminding the students to take risks was beyond necessary. Some of the students seemed afraid to pull the trigger and attempt the problems. This is something that was addressed and needs to continue to be addressed. I taught the students how to plot functions using Excel. Most students wanted to just do it by hand, but after the tutorial, they all felt Excel was much better.

The bell ringer involved the following problems.

1. Convert 5'10" to feet.
2. A person is 5'10" weighs 210 pounds. Predict whether that person is underweight, normal, overweight, or obese. Guess! Do not actually calculate. Explain your reasoning.
3. Calculate a person's BMI that weighs 210 pound and has a height of 5'10".
4. Was your prediction correct?
5. A doctor suggests to that person that their BMI needs to equal 20, how much weight should they lose in order to do that?

After this, we went over how to plot functions on Excel using a simple function. Then, the students repeated the skill in their groups. Finally, the students plot the BAI function individually and emailed all of their plots to me for assessing.

Continue for a screenshot of student work...